Jägerlein gets a sympathetic judge who reduces the charge, and she only does a month in the jug. But a month is long enough for Annchen’s ashes to come back to the village with an official note declaring that she died of blood poisoning from warts on her lip and had been cremated to avoid infection. The urn is delivered to her parents, but they say Jägerlein can have it. It’s a hard thing that we do, the Führer has resolutely said of this aspect of his racial policy, but future generations will thank us for it. And perhaps some will, who knows? But Jägerlein won’t thank him for it. She keeps Annchen’s ashes in an urn in her bedroom in the farmhouse, where she’s been assigned to work now that Francois has been hauled off. Apparently the economy has other plans for him as well, and Jägerlein never sees her Frenchman again.
Nor does she ever see Dr Koch again, to whom, if she did, she’d have given a salty piece of her mind. You could have saved her, she would have told him. You could have filled that form out differently. You could have said Annchen could spell Berlin. You could have said she knew the answer to that sum, which by the way I didn’t know myself … But Dr Koch is now as far beyond her reach in another element as Annchen is in hers. Soon after Annchen’s ashes are returned we hear the doctor’s motorbike racing late at night along the lakeside road as though he’s hastening to a terrible accident. Which in a sense he is, but it hasn’t happened yet. It doesn’t happen till he reaches the hairpin corner halfway round, where, instead of slowing, he unaccountably accelerates still more and soars off the edge, sidecar and all, into the deepest part of the lake.
The lake does not give up its dead, the villagers say, and certainly it doesn’t give up Dr Koch. Neither he nor his three-wheeled vehicle are ever seen again.
Jägerlein sees Willibald again, though. But no word of reproach ever passes her lips. Not surprisingly, because she’ll never know his part in Annchen’s death. No one ever tells her what Pfarrer Brinkmann told the man in the dark suit. Least of all, of course, does Pfarrer Brinkmann himself.
Yes, this is the year of disappearances all right. But there’s one more disappearance that’s been planned and rehearsed as carefully as any in these months, and yet does not take place. That’s a pity, because it’s –
13
Just the one we needed
May has passed and summer’s definitely come. So have the Tommies and the Amis – they’ve come to Normandy and seem to be advancing into Fortress Europe despite our boys’ fanatical resistance. One of the Tommies is Lotte and Solomon’s son Wolfgang, although we don’t know that yet and they never will. He’s dropped out of the sky near Caen, in a special Jewish Commando Company. That’s where some really fanatical Aryan resistance is going on, but he must be up to that because our boys are giving more blood and ground than the Tommies are.
The Führer resolutely assures the world however that this is just the chance he’s been waiting for, the decisive battle where he’s going to administer their ultimately crushing come-uppance to the Allies. If that’s the case, Fräulein von Adler cackles, composedly stuffing tea leaves as fine as dust into her pipe-bowl with her blackened thumb, why did he try to stop them coming? But of course she doesn’t have the Führer’s head for strategy. Nor does she know about his new secret weapon, the Vengeance One (not to speak of Vengeance Two – there’s a lot of vengeance going round), that will soon be pulverising the Tommies’ cities.
As if to make up for two of the people that have disappeared – Annchen and Jägerlein – another two have popped up in their place. Fräulein Hofer the seamstress, and her niece Resi. Fräulein Hofer comes once a week to darn our worn-out clothes and sew buttons on our frayed shirts and trousers. Fräulein Hofer’s a Catholic, but that doesn’t stop her coming to a Protestant house, even a minister’s. Maybe she’s an early ecumenicalist, not that she would recognise the term. Nor does she mind entering a semi-Jewish household, although her mother, who scares me rigid because she’s got one finger missing, is a zealous Party member.
No, what Fräulein Hofer balks at is the laundry. Gabi asked her to help with that too, but the idea of Aryans washing Jewish clothes is too much for her mother – just think of the contamination in a pair of Jewish socks or knickers – so Fräulein Hofer, in deference to the old woman, who sometimes scowls and shakes her mutilated hand at me as I come home from school, draws the line there. But sewing is all right, or at least it’s not so bad. So now our dirty washing gets sent by train to Pels, eighty kilometres away, where it’s known simply as Pfarrer Brinkmann’s, and comes back neatly washed and ironed by innocent Aryan hands about two months later, by which time we’re all looking pretty scruffy. It costs, and Willibald objects. But he also objects if his shirts aren’t starched and ironed, and Gabi’s efforts in that department, even when she manages to get round to it, just can’t match Jägerlein’s. So the last of dead Aunt Frieda’s unused dowry, which for eleven years has lain along with her nurse’s uniform in a trunk in the attic, is getting sold piecemeal in the village. In ten years’ time tourists here will be eating off tablecloths embroidered by Frieda’s hand with Frieda’s initials. If Willibald complains bitterly to his plump Aryan lady friend about his wife’s reckless extravagance, he does so in floppy woollen underpants and starched shirts (if he’s still got them on) that have been laundered in Pels.
But as for darning – well, despite the official proscription against performing any kind of ‘personal service’ for Jews, it’s Fräulein Hofer who plies her Aryan needle on our washed but mixed-breed clothes, accompanied by her niece Resi, who’s ten years old now and mainly sits and watches, although her eyes and lips still offer me that tentative smile I first noticed three years ago in school. How Fräulein Hofer reconciles this with her mother’s attitude to racial hygiene and indeed with the official decrees is a mystery, but there are many mysteries in the Third Reich, and this is not the greatest. After all, Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer allowed Jägerlein to work in our half-Jewish household all those years, so perhaps she too considers it’s the Aryan half she’s working for. And she certainly does need the money.
Resi is a kind of orphan. Her mother inconsiderately died in childbirth and her soldier father was so incensed by his wife’s desertion that he gave the baby to his unmarried sister before he went back to his artillery regiment. ‘Here, you take her,’ he said, as if it was all her fault. ‘You’ll never get married, but at least you can bring a kid up.’ And he was right on both counts. Fräulein Hofer, plain and sexless as a nun, never has got married, but she’s bringing Resi up all right. When her father comes home on leave, they all have dinner together, but he doesn’t stay long because he’s got a girlfriend in Bad Neusee.
Fräulein Hofer and Resi come every Saturday morning, at nine on the dot. She sits at the sewing machine and Resi sit swinging her legs beside her. Fräulein Hofer never utters a word except to say ‘Gruess Gott’ and ask for instructions, which she rarely needs. Into the basket goes her hand, out comes a shirt or sheet, her foot presses the treadle and the machine whirs away for an hour and a half. She often has a thread of cotton hanging down from her lips, and sometimes I wonder if she’s got the whole spool inside her mouth and what would happen if I pulled the end. Maybe she’s swallowed it, I sometimes think. Maybe she’s got a dozen spools inside her.
At half-past ten the treadle stops and they both take a cup of ersatz milk coffee (which Gabi provides) and a thick slice of buttered bread (which they provide). When twelve o’clock strikes on the grandfather clock in Willibald’s study, the treadle stops again, Fräulein Hofer packs away the basket and they silently leave.
This is no compensation for the loss of Jägerlein’s chanted poems and Annchen’s simple grunts of pleasure, but it’s peaceful all the same, and I start to like the days they come. Gabi says I should play with Resi, which naturally makes me want to do anything but. Besides, although she’s in my class at school and offers me her fleeting smiles, she’s still an Aryan and a girl while I am neither, and on both counts we’ve never s
poken to each other, so why should we start now? It’s going to take more than Gabi’s encouragement to get Resi and me any closer. All the same, something draws me to the living room when they are here.
It’s on one of those Saturdays in July, when the school holidays have just begun, that Fräulein Hofer breaks her vow of silence an hour or so after she’s arrived and casually mentions there’s been an attempt on the Führer’s life. Her mother heard it on the wireless that morning, she says as she threads the needle. Some army officers, she thinks it was. She imparts this information quite neutrally, in the way she sometimes says she’ll darn that tablecloth next time, there won’t be time today; so it’s impossible to tell what she thinks about the news. After a tantalising pause to remove the white thread dangling from her mouth, she continues in the same inexpressive tone, ‘Apparently they failed.’
Perhaps it’s the unexcited manner of her delivery that conceals the full importance of her news from me, but all the same I sense this is a weighty moment. As for Gabi and Willibald – there’s no doubting the effect it has on them. Gabi looks like someone who’s just been told her death sentence has been commuted and in the next breath told that no, it hasn’t after all. Which is just about the fact of the matter. ‘Ach nein!’ she exclaims in that tone of anguished disappointment that I’ve so often heard before.
The effect on Willibald is more electric. He’s still in his shorty night shirt, which at least is newly washed from Pels, and which Resi has grown quite used to and contemplates with only passing interest now. Perhaps she thinks, not having a proper father herself, that every proper father dresses like that at home. Perhaps she even thinks that every proper father wears a cat’s pelt on his chest as well, since Tabby’s floppy paw sometimes waves to her from round Willibald’s throat. But now as Willibald gasps and dashes off upstairs, his night shirt’s minimal tails flap like flustered chickens’ wings, disclosing unappealing vistas of flabby and etiolated nether parts. Resi’s interest is only mildly quickened by this display, but Gabi hastens up after him, trying ineffectually to block the innocent child’s view with her own body. There are tense but hushed interchanges in their bedroom and then Gabi comes down looking flushed, and mechanically bids me yet again to play with Resi, an injunction both of us smile self-consciously at and ignore. She is soon followed by Willibald, who appears now in respectable clerical garb and hurries excitedly off to the market place to glean the latest news.
It isn’t until after twelve, when Fräulein Hofer and Resi have quietly gone home, that Willibald returns. Yes, it’s true, he declares in the kitchen. There’s been a plot to kill the Führer. A bomb in his bunker, and it’s only the hand of Providence that’s preserved his life. Most of the plotters have been arrested, some have been put against a wall and shot, the rest will soon be tried and hanged.
It seems The People’s Observer, from whose pages Willibald has gleaned his information, consider the Reich has won a great victory just because Adolf is, like God, still with us.
Willibald curses the plotters, and at first I suppose he’s mad at them because they bungled the job. That must be what Sara and Ilse think too, because they’re going round shutting the windows although it’s one of those sultry summer days when even Heimstatt is too hot. But no, he means they’re traitors, violating their soldiers’ oath (the oath that both he and I still know by heart), and they deserve everything that’s come or coming to them, which I later hear from Fritzi Wimmer includes being hanged by piano wire attached to butchers’ hooks.
‘What?’ Gabi almost screams. ‘What? D’you know what you’re saying?’
It seems he does, because he repeats it with flashing military eyes. ‘An oath’s an oath!’ he declares. ‘A sacred promise! A soldier’s honour!’
Is that a line from King Solomon, I wonder? Or King David? I wouldn’t know. I’m completely ignorant about the Bible as a whole and the Old Testament in particular, which the Third Reich in any case holds to be a crazy web of degenerate Jewish confabulation. ‘Any soldier who breaks his oath is a traitor and a villain!’ Willibald rushes on in full rhetorical spate. Well, if that isn’t King Solomon it must be King David. I do at least know David was handy with a sling and did a lot of fighting. ‘Fiat iustitia,’ Willibald is declaiming now in a mystifying exercise of his classical learning, ‘ruat caelum!’1
Gabi doesn’t know more than two words of Latin, and neither is among those four, but she gets the drift anyway. She’s getting a glass of water from the jug on the dresser too, but fires a broadside as she passes. ‘Have you forgotten your children?’ she demands. ‘Of course you forgot me long ago, I know that!’ Then her cheeks bulge with a belated mouthful of the Kaminsky cure.
‘You wouldn’t understand! What could honour mean to you?’
Sara and I are edging closer to the oven now. This looks like a big one. So Willibald’s powers have not diminished after all.
It looks still more like a big one when Gabi suddenly gulps down the water she’s just got into her mouth and splutters out ‘Honour?! Honour?! What about your family’s lives, for God’s sake?’
‘Yes, honour means nothing to you, I know that! That’s why we’re always in debt! And why you take the Lord’s name in vain –’
‘You typical German blockhead!’ Gabi’s screaming now, and already clutching her side with an incipient gall-bladder attack. ‘Sticking to that … that … murderer? You call that honour?!’
‘Can’t you get it into your Jewish head that a German officer does not break his oath?’ Willibald really looks the part now – the part, that is, of a poor weak former corporal aping a blockhead Prussian general.
‘Yes, at last you’ve let it out!’ screams Gabi. ‘Jewish! You hate me for it, don’t you? Just like all the others!’
‘Haven’t I stood by you all this time?’ Willibald demands, which, though pertinent, does not exactly answer Gabi’s question.
‘Stood by me? You don’t have the nerve to throw me out, that’s all! All you want is to be rid of me, isn’t it?’
‘And that’s all the thanks I get?’ Which, though pertinent again, does not exactly answer her second question either. He’s got a plate in both hands now and is holding it above his head for all to see and tremble.
‘Well, leave, then!’ shouts Gabi. ‘If that’s how you feel! Leave! Send me to a concentration camp like all my relatives! It’ll come to that in the end anyway!’
‘May I remind you that one of your relatives, so far from being in a concentration camp, has deserted his country?’ he inquires with frigid ferocity. Pianistic Wolfgang, he means, whose parents were deported last year to the East. ‘And for all we know he may even be aiding and abetting the enemy at this very moment!’ Smash goes the plate on the floor and out stalks Willibald. As he doesn’t threaten suicide, it’s probably his plump Aryan lady friend he’s going to, not the lake, though how are we to know that?
The smash of plate and slam of door brings on one of Gabi’s acutest gall-bladder attacks, and Sara goes to boil some water for a poultice while Ilse silently retreats to her room, taking the stairs slowly one foot at a time like a weary nun returning to her cell. Sara’s left her notebook by the stove, but I don’t sneak a look inside. For one thing I don’t feel like it then. But for another I know the kind of stuff that’s in it, and it really doesn’t interest me. Not now, anyway. Besides, I’ve known for a long time that she keeps her notebooks under the mattress in her room, as Martin keeps material of a different nature under the mattress in his. I could look at it any time. I’ve sneaked a look at Martin’s already. I found it odd. Why were all those ladies half-undressed? How ridiculous they looked! Still, something about them did capture my attention. I thought I might look at them again one day, which I don’t think about Sara’s notebooks for quite a time to come.
As soon as Martin arrives home (who knows where he’s been? It’s his day off and he certainly isn’t telling. Wherever it was, though, it’s a safe bet Lisl Wimmer’s been there with him
) – as soon as Martin arrives home, Frau Wimmer comes knocking at the door, a thing she hasn’t done for several years and never in my limited memory. ‘Have you heard the shocking news about the Führer?’ she asks Gabi in a hushed and cloying voice. Has she taken over the counter-intelligence duties that Lisl doesn’t seem to have the heart for now and Franzi not the stomach?
‘Yes,’ Gabi replies. She’s hobbling about with a hot water bottle pressed to her side now. ‘Shocking,’ she agrees, though what’s shocked her about it might not be what’s shocked Frau Wimmer.
‘I suppose you don’t happen to have a box of matches to spare?’ Frau Wimmer continues artlessly. She can’t be very inventive if that worn out cover is the best she can think up.
‘I do have a match or two,’ Gabi answers guardedly, mindful of the Nazi allegations that The Jew, or what is left of him, is hoarding all the goodies that are in short supply. ‘But I don’t have a spare box. We’re down to our last one. They haven’t had any for weeks, my husband says.’
‘All right then,’ Frau Wimmer says, peering past Gabi into the hall. ‘Of course it’s not so bad for you, is it? I mean you wouldn’t mind as much as we would, would you?’
Gabi grimaces, pushing the hot water bottle hard against her aching side. ‘We need matches too,’ she protests mildly.
‘No, about the Führer,’ Frau Wimmer says, smiling archly now. ‘I mean it stands to reason doesn’t it? You wouldn’t miss him like we would, would you? If anything happened to him, I mean … ?’
Gabi hesitates. Has this afternoon’s big one left her reckless? I sense she’s on the edge and there’s a long drop down if she steps over. Sara’s filling another hot water bottle in the kitchen, Martin’s gone upstairs like Ilse (though he won’t be praying as she probably is, unless it is to Venus) and I know I’m not the kind that can pull my mother back from the brink. All I can do is wish Gabi had another dash of water in her mouth. But it’s all right, she pulls herself together and steps back from the brink of her own accord. ‘Where would the Fatherland be without the Führer?’ she asks Frau Wimmer blandly at last.
The Kaminsky Cure Page 20